Let's Be Honest: 'GTA Online' Is In Beta

Dave Thier
, ContributorI write about video games and technology.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

My experience with GTA V Online (Photo credit: Craighton Miller)

It's been almost two weeks since Rockstar launched GTA Online, the online component of GTA 5, and the game is working better than it was before. After a few days of inaccessible servers, deleted characters and frequent connection problems, the pseudo-MMO is chugging along, not perfectly mind you, but at least on a functional level. As a way of apologizng to frustrated players, Rockstar gave anyone that's been online already $500,000 in in-game currency.

This isn't the worst thing in the world -- after all, GTA 5 has a fully functional offline mode, and has already made more than $1 billion, so the company is doing just fine. But the headache associated with two weeks worth of the stories about how GTA Online doesn't work is a pain for anyone trying to launch a new online game, and the lack of momentum must be infuriating. Warning us about a buggy start, clearly, was not enough. There's one easy way that Rockstar could have avoided essentially all of this negative publicity, and launched a polished product to the market to boot: just call the launch period an open beta.

It's become clear that no matter how good your company is at making video games, launching an online product to a giant audience is rife with potential for error. SimCity and Diablo 3 both shut down, as have numerous MMOs, and even Obama's Affordable Healthcare Exchange is struggling under higher than expected server load. Luckily, the tech world at large has an invaluable tool for helping new products launch cleanly. All games do some form of beta, and I'd argue that Rockstar actually is doing a beta right now. It had millions of people logging on to test a product not quite ready for the market. But by not calling it a beta, it has frustrated huge numbers of players who expected a polished game.

A closed beta might test your product, but an open beta can test your infrastructure, and that's where GTA Online's problem lies. An open beta of the kind it's running right now would seem to be the only way to truly test the product's infrastructure against large numbers of players. Rockstar got honesty points for warning players that there would be bugs at launch -- the next step would have been admitting that it just wasn't a finished product.